I had a very nice mediation experience last night. I placed a tiny Buddha at eye level on the kids' table, surrounded by tiny paper prayer flags. They prayers are in Sanskrit, so I have no idea what they say. I then sat in the lotus position and focused my vision on the statue. I closed my eyes and drove out all thoughts except for a generalized feeling of compassion, which is what I had decided to meditate on. No great thoughts, just a kind of general notion. I stretched my back and neck, opened my rib cage, and did some deliberate breathing. Whenever my mind strayed, I opened my eyes and refocused on the little statue and prayer flags. I did all of this twice, and I felt very, very good afterwards. I could only describe it as a spiritual experience.

The last really spiritual experience I had at church (not direcly involving my own wife and kids, of course) was in the early 1990s. I was in an amazingly diverse little ward in the inner city. We had one fast and testimony meeting that blew away everybody who was there. We opened with "The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning" -- and we meant it. There was a series of deeply moving testimonies. I suppose that the heavy influence of the African-American church remained with many of the members of this ward when they became LDS, and they in turn influenced the white members of the ward. It was almost as if we were going to be translated like the proverbial City of Enoch. At one point, a black man walked in and sat for a minute, then went to the podium. He said that he was a Baptist and would remain that way, but that he was standing at the bus stop out front and felt a special spirit coming from our building. He felt compelled to come in and be a part of it. It was a truly amazing example of group spirituality.

I held onto that experience for years as I sat through countless boring meetings in which the right rote things were spouted over and over again with no passion of any kind. It's as if the Mormon Church institutionally has had an emotional lobotomy. Is that a consequence of correlation? Whatever, they've pretty much squeezed away spontaneous spirituality of the kind I experienced last night.